Here are links to some of the most popular Teaching News articles over the past few months, in case you have missed any of them:

• Communication 4 All – Have you visited this wonderful resource site?
• Safer Internet Day – Lots of links and advice for teaching your pupils about staying safe online.
• Anithings Offer – A special offer (which has now ended) offering visitors to Teaching News a discount and free gift for purchases of this fantastic animation software.
• Creative Curriculum – Information and links about creative curriculum ideas.
• Ryan’s Thinkers Keys – Download a set of activities that children can take part in at the start of the day, or as part of other lessons.
• New Primary Curriculum Online – Find out all about the new primary curriculum and how to find it online.
• Planbee and Twinkl – Have you seen these new teaching resource sites?
• Spelling Resources – A selection of links and resources to support the teaching of spelling in your classroom.
• Primary Teacher Resource Centre – Take part in this active forum for primary school teachers.
• KS2 Spelling Lists – Download some useful lists of spelling words.

I’m really pleased to announce a new iPhone application for teachers. The app is called TeachingUK and it’s available in the App store now! The application is a really easy way for teachers to find the latest news (from this Teaching News blog) as well as the most recent additions to Teaching Ideas.

You can also browse the Teaching News and Teaching Ideas sites within the app if you want to see the content in more detail:

The app also allows you to browse the most recent tweets from the @TeachingIdeas Twitter account (which now has over 2,000 followers). To install the app, just visit http://bit.ly/teachinguk or search for TeachingUK in the App Store.

I am planning a future post about other useful iPhone applications for teachers. If you use any great education apps on your iPhone / iPod Touch, please get in touch by email or by leaving a comment below. Thanks.

This will be the last post on Teaching News for 2009 as I am taking a break from posting over the Christmas holidays.

I hope that you have an enjoyable break and a fantastic 2010!

Mark

Image – Pencil Crayon Tree

Here are links to the most popular ‘Teaching News‘ posts for November 2009 in case you missed some of them the first time around:

1. Fireworks – Ideas and links to help celebrate Fireworks night.
2. Remembrance Sunday – Useful links for activities related to Remembrance Sunday
3. Competition – Win DK Books – This competition has now closed. The winner will be announced shortly!
4. Blank Top Trumps – Unfortunately, these Top Trumps files are no longer available on the site. I’ve contacted the creator but he no longer has copies either. If you have a copy of the file, please email me and I’ll upload them so that others can use them too. They’re obviously very popular!
5. Communication 4 All – Have you explored this wonderful site yet?
6. Competition – Where do you like to learn? – Did you enter Dell’s competition to win a tablet PC / netbook?
7. Creative Curriculum – Information and links about creative curriculum ideas.
8. Fruit and Vegetable Colouring Pictures – A set of free downloadable resources for work related to food / healthy eating / plants.
9. Numeracy Helper – A useful site with free Numeracy resources.
10. Skoolio – PSHE and Classroom Powerpoints – Have you downloaded any of these fantastic Powerpoint presentations yet?

Here are links to the most popular ‘Teaching News‘ posts for October 2009. Which ones were most useful for you?

1. Top 10 Teaching Ideas (Sep ‘09) – A list of the most popular ideas on Teaching Ideas.
2. Free Stuff for Teachers – A fantastic site with free resources for teachers to use.
3. Superclubs Plus Free Trial – Sign up to Superclubs with our offer, now extended until 30th November 2009.
4. 100 Best Open Source Apps for Education – How many of these apps do you use?
5. Communication for All – Download lots of top quality resources on this great site.
6. The Potato Story – A wonderful site to support work in Science lessons.
7. New Ideas to Inspire – Have you discovered the new presentations on Ideas to Inspire?
8. Staying Organised – How do you manage all of the jobs that teachers have to do?
9. The Art Classroom – Visit this wonderful blog and discover lots of art ideas and student work.
10. Cool Tools for Schools – An amazing directory of tools that schools can take advantage of.

It is now almost two months since I set up Teaching News, taking over all of Andrew Ross’ wonderful Primary Teacher UK blog posts, and trying to continue his work here. As this site is still relatively new, I have set up a survey to find out what you think of the site. I would be very grateful if you could spend a few minutes completing the 10 short questions below. Your feedback will be very helpful to me as I continue to work on the site in the future. Thank you.

Welcome to Teaching News!

Teaching News aims to share the latest news, links and teaching ideas, in order to support teachers around the world.

The site was created by merging two existing teaching blogs:

• Primary Teacher UK – This blog was set up by Andrew Ross in 2005 and contained education-related news, suggested links and lots of useful information for teachers. After four years of regular updates, Andrew sadly decided to end the blog. However, he kindly allowed me to take over the site, so that I was able to ensure that all of his useful content (along with that of the other contributors to his blog) remained online.
• Teaching Blog – The Teaching Blog was originally created in May 2009 to accompany my own Teaching Ideas site, allowing me to share news and information about the site. I also added links to useful sites and shared teaching news as often as possible.

The content from both of these blogs has now been combined and it is my aim to update this new site as regularly as possible.

If you have any news, links or suggestions for new additions to this Teaching News site, please get in touch.

Mark Warner